My adventure in making cloth wipes.
My husband and I are going to start trying to conceive our first baby very soon; we’ve decided to go with cloth diapers and cloth wipes to cut down on waste and save money. I’ve done a lot of research into materials and which type of diapers were going to use, the best brands, the cutest designs, and the cost.
Did you know that the average cost of buying disposable diapers is $2,700 from birth till their potty trained. Some babies go through more diapers than others. I am going to guess that baby wipes are going to cost about the same or maybe more. Since I'm already going to be washing cloth diapers I might as well wash the wipes.
My husband and I will also be using these wipes for ourselves. We got a bidet; which I absolutely love! That fresh clean feeling after going to the bathroom is amazing, but I don’t want to just walk around with a wet bum and I’m not a fan of toilet paper so to dry our bums after using the bidet well use these cloth wipes also.
I was cleaning out our closet and deciding what we were going to keep and what to donate. I found this old blanket my sister had given me a long time ago and I was going to donate it. Than the though hit me that I could cut it up and make wipes from it. It actually worked out better than I thought, the blanket was really really big and I was able to get a pretty big stack of squares from it.
The blanket had these tassels around the whole blanket so I cut those off which ended up being a lot of tassels and as I was cutting them off my kitty Mr. Meow Meows was trying to pull them from me, he is quite the helper. It took me about 20 mins to cut them all off.
The next step was to mark my squares to cut out and than cut them out. I made each square to be 8”x8” and I used an envelope to measure and as a straight edge since I don’t have a wooden ruler. Since the blanket wasn’t cut completely level I had to mark the square than cut it out and do this for each one instead of marking the whole blanket than cutting. This only took me about an hour to do and once I finished cutting I had a few squares that were smaller than the 8x8 because I wanted to use as much of the material as I could. I ended up with 55 squares from the blanket.
Reading some blogs about cloth wipes the normal stash is around 20-30 wipes so I figured this would be a great amount for the baby and for the bathroom and I wouldn’t have to do laundry everyday to keep up.
The blanket is a really bright orange, since were using them to clean butts the color doesn’t really matter plus them being free is awesome but while I was cutting the material there was like orange lint all over my scissors and sewing machine. My only concern with that is I hope when we clean the babies or our bum it doesn’t leave orange lint behind, that would be the worst.
So now that I had all the squares cut out I needed to sew the edges so they don’t start to curl and to help the wipes stay flat. I don’t have a serger which makes those really nice clean edges and I’m not the greatest at sewing so I had to create an edge as close to the cloth edge as I could. I played around with different edges and got better as I did each one; the first half of the stack were not that great and turned out kinda messy but were the only ones going to see them so it didn’t really matter. The second stack got a lot cleaner edges and closer the edge than the previous ones. I took me around 4 hours to complete whole stack.
Once I was finished I washed and dried them, they left orange lint all over our wool dryer balls and I’m hoping that will just happen with the first wash since the fresh edges. So well test them out and see how well they work and if they leave lint. I hope they work just fine and I won’t have to buy new ones.
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The blanket I used. I had to cut all the tassels off.
